Amis, discussing his last novel The Pregnant Widow, also drew parallels between beauty and ageing, stating: “You get ugly when you get old. Everything seems fine until you’re about 40. Then something is definitely about to go wrong.”

He said that in your early fifties you were “suddenly visited by the past” which was like a huge palace with different rooms.

And he disclosed that he had told his sons that when they have affairs they must remember every detail as they would need “these rooms with a girl in each one” when they were old.

The writer also spoke about pornography, declaring that it seemed women had “partly accepted and come to enjoy it” which represented an “enormous social change”.